


One Question Less

by stardust_made



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (of the deep and abiding kind), All the brothers feelings, Angst, Coda, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Intense, Love, Season/Series 08, to 8.23
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 03:59:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam asks an important question. Dean holds him and answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Question Less

**Author's Note:**

> Like I said to the lovely [analineblue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/analineblue/pseuds/analineblue) who looked this fic over for me, writing it was like first aid. I needed something to get me through the first wave of intense Winchester brothers feelings the season finale produced—I hope you'll enjoy too, and thank you for reading!

 

Sam plummets into a semi-lucid state on the way home, although the moments that are clear are crystal clear; enough for him to know that here, slumped in the passenger seat of the Impala while she’s furiously pulling forward under Dean’s iron hands, here, he’s already home.  
  
***  
  
He is looking up a hill. The wind and the rain keep scooping up his hair in their belligerent hands, then throwing it in his face. He’s spitting it out, he’s panting and squinting, trying to make out the church on top of the hill. Only the moon and the odd lightning are there to guide him, and just like that he’s already half-way up. He knows it, but when he looks up, the church is just as far as it was before. He keeps going; he even tries running up. He’s slipping and sliding in the damp darkness, his heartbeat a doomed drumming in his ears. His breathing transforms into sobs: frustrated, then frightened, then desperate. He needs to get up there. Dean is up there, alone, and for some reason it feels scarier than if he was there with every single monster they’ve ever killed. Dean is up there, but no matter the effort the top of the hill doesn’t come closer. No matter how hard he pushes, no matter what distance he eats up, it’s always far up there, unreachable. He growls and keeps climbing; he falls and cries out; he goes on crawling through the sliding mud and grass, and it gets more and more slippery, until even his hands lose their grip. He flails calling out Dean’s name, keeps calling to let him know he’s there, to let him know that at least he’s trying to get to him. _Please, God, let him know that I’m here, please, let him know that I’m trying, please, God, don’t let him think—_  
  
“Sammy!” Dean’s voice, right next to him. “Sam, come on!” Commanding but close to quivering too.  
  
Sam’s eyes snap open and focus on his brother’s tense face hovering above him. There’s harsh breathing and thudding in Sam’s ears as if he’s underwater. He realizes the sounds are coming from him just as the noise simmers down. Dean’s features blur for a moment while the background comes into focus. Dean’s room. Sam clasps both his hands on his brother’s forearms and blinks at him, raising his head a little.  
  
“It was just a nightmare,” Dean says with a nod, lips pursing exaggeratedly to convince Sam, just in case. “That’s all. You’ve been out for an hour.”  
  
Sam keeps looking at him, unwilling to let go now that he’s found a thread connecting him to reality. Dean’s eyes lose their haunted edge.  
  
“You back with me?” he says. “Sammy?”  
  
“Yeah.” Sam lightly pats him on the arms, but doesn’t let go. “Yeah.”  
  
Dean scans his face, then begins to straighten up. Sam feels the damp drag of his own fingers against the hairs on Dean’s arms, against his skin—all slipping away. He tightens his hold without thinking; the movement under his hands stops immediately.  
  
Sam lifts his eyes to Dean, the dream still resonating, now dull, now high-pitched. He wants to say something, something mundane and real, but he finds he’s unable to put anything into words. There’s too much packed in him. Fears, some primal, some sophisticated, experiences he barely remembers, and recent shocks. What he needs and he knows he needs, but also things he just senses that he needs, storming in from the uncharted territory of the sublime and the darkness it harbours. Sam can feel it all clamouring up to get out and it’s like he’s both thirty and three at the same time.  
  
Judging by the look on his brother’s face they’re on the same page. It’s fascinating watching something so steely, so strong and indestructible, become undone into softness.  
  
“Move,” Dean says, extracting himself from Sam’s grip and giving his shoulder a light smack. “C’mon. Scoot your giant ass over.”  
  
It takes Sam a moment to realize what Dean’s planning to do, and then he is scooting his giant ass over. The bed dips when Dean sits on it. He stretches out his legs, back thumping against the frame. Sam’s curled on his right side, shoulder on the squashed pillow. His neck cranes as he looks up at Dean’s still settling form, and panic starts rising again—he’s strangely bereft of Dean’s closeness for all that his brother is right there. Dean’s gaze falls on his face and almost looks panicked too, then his features rearrange into something softer still, and a little exasperated. He slides a bit lower and half turns to Sam.  
  
Sam tries to lift himself on his elbow, then chokes out silently with the searing pain flaring up in his entire body. Dean’s jaw tightens and his eyes look up for a second, reflected pain and something akin to helplessness in them, as if he’s both threatening and pleading with the skies.  
  
The skies through which there were angels striking golden paths, like enormous shooting stars you better hope you haven’t wished anything upon. Sam shuts his eyes at the vision and slowly shifts until his forehead is brushing against Dean’s side, almost where his heart is. Then he stills completely.  
  
“Did the angels really fall from heaven?” he asks.  
  
“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean answers quietly. “They did.”  
  
Sam nods tentatively, shuffles a few inches closer.  
  
“And we didn’t close the gates of Hell.” It’s not a question. It’s all flicking into existence in Sam’s head—not gradually, not like a torch bringing up bits in stark relief. Like turning the power on to an entire continent.  
  
It’s not a question, yet somehow it still takes Dean longer to answer. “No.” He takes a breath and speaks again on the exhale. “But we will.”  
  
“How?” Sam isn’t sure if that’s a question. He says the word in a small voice, the kind he used when he was little and he thought Dean had all the answers. Not Dad—Dean. And what answers he didn’t have, he could find them. Dean could fix everything: broken toys and broken skin, aches that had no name, a quick sandwich, a make-believe hut where monsters couldn’t get to them. His brother appeared and some weight disappeared in Sam’s little chest, like he knew that just by being there Dean could sort anything out.  
  
Sam’s chest is so big now that if their places were reversed, he could engulf Dean in it. He shouldn’t be asking stupid questions.  
  
“You should have let me finish it,” he murmurs into Dean’s t-shirt. Dean’s breathing changes as if he’s huffed out a small, bitter laugh. “We were so close.” Sam keeps going, the stubborn one, always pushing, because there’s always been Dean to push against. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”  
  
 _‘Why did you stop me?’_ he wants to ask, but underneath that there’s another question—a ripple to the answer Dean already gave him back in the church. A part of Sam cringes with the memory of him breaking down like that, but it’s a small part. The rest of him is overwhelmed by this other question, and Sam wonders how long it’s been waiting to take form, how long it’s been waiting to be heard.  
  
The very existence of that question is why Sam fell apart back there. The necessity to ask is his promise to put himself back together.  
  
“Why do you love me so much?” he says, his breakdown finally liberating his tongue around that rounded, huge, supremely simple word they never say out loud. Dean tenses against him.  
  
“What the—” he starts, but the words are rushing out of Sam now, a flood that would break anything in its path.  
  
“Why, Dean?” he asks. “I mean it’s not just because we’re family. Other people have brothers, too; other people have twins. There’s love and there’s _love_ , and I know the difference. I can feel the difference, and I want to know, Dean; Dean, why?”  
  
He hears his name, spoken tiredly and warningly, but he’s nowhere near finished.  
  
“You say I come before anything. After everything—Why? I’m not the star pupil. I’m not the best little brother out there. I’m screwed up, and I’ve failed you, and I know—Don’t! Okay, don’t. I believe you, I know you don’t care, but that doesn’t change…what I’ve done. It’s because I believe you, man, that’s why I don’t understand. It’s not because of what we’ve been through together. A lot of what we’ve been through was _because_ you love me so much.”  
  
“Jesus, Sam.” It’s wrung out, on the threshold of broken. Sam finally peels himself off from the muted world of Dean’s chest and looks up, paws at him to impart the importance of what Sam’s saying. To stop him from running, too, because Sam might be going through the emotional grater, but he’s kept his eye on the basics—this kind of thing here scares Dean worse than death.  
  
He wipes his eyes quickly and grabs hold of Dean again, muscle and cotton alive in his hands. He tilts his head, face tightening in demand for answers.  
  
Dean just stares at him. It’s like his heart isn’t pumping blood anymore but pure emotion, spilling it out through the only outlet available—Dean’s eyes look like they’re imploding with the force of it all, but they’re also keen and in focus, like he’s actually thinking. Like it matters to him to find the answer, not just because his little brother hangs onto his every word, but because of himself—because he wants to know.  
  
“Why do you love me so much?” Sam asks again, the words quiet and clearly distinguishable, a summary of a life-long mystery; an epitaph of a life-long driving force.  
  
Dean shakes his head a little, to himself more than to Sam.  
  
“Because it’s you,” he tells Sam, a trill of marvel in his voice, mixing with gravity. “I know that’s not the kind of answer you expect, but that’s it. That’s all I got, Sammy. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. You’re you. I know _you_. I think of you, and it’s—And that’s it for me.” He looks at Sam like he’ll keep talking, or like he hasn’t stopped in his head. A whole conversation is happening between them somewhere under the surface, and that’s fitting somehow, because they’re already underground here. Layer upon layer, and it’s raining angels, and there’s one question less on Sam’s list.  
  
He nods a few times quickly, weakness overtaking him to prevent anything more, then he starts folding back on himself. Pain floods him with the motion. His knees slide up to his stomach and his chin drops, until the vertebrae at the back of his neck are exposed, like a sacrificial offering to be snapped.  
  
Dean’s body instantly starts moving with his, impossible to remain still while Sam’s isn’t. The hurt switches off just as abruptly as it exploded, in one tiny instant in which Sam deliriously thinks that maybe Dean’s body moves with his because it can’t help it. Because they’re an experiment of Heaven or Hell that went horribly wrong: conjoined twins that somehow got separated, so now they’re destined to go through life twitching grotesquely on their own—the further apart, the worse the twitching, going all the way down to their souls.  
  
He scoots closer to Dean, irrationally imagining how his muscles and joints will relax, his flesh and blood will calm down, stay red and plainly human just for a moment, just to let Sam catch his breath. It must have hitched or he must have made another distressed sound, because there’s suddenly warmth everywhere, as Dean curls around him, hands coming to rest on Sam’s back. Dean’s heart is a loud, unapologetic rhythm next to Sam’s cheek. Sam wonders if this is Dean’s way of letting go for a moment, taking his craved seconds of peace. Sam can’t see his brother’s face, now that he’s almost burrowed in the curve of his torso, but that’s okay. He doesn’t need to see it. Maybe it’s exactly because Sam can’t see him that Dean allows himself to have the face that Sam is sure he has now. Maybe it’s only if he hides Sam, like a protective shell around him, that Dean himself can stop hiding.  
  
Sam slowly rolls his forehead against Dean’s chest, enjoying the resistance of cotton separating their skins.  
  
“What are we going to do now?” he asks, then hears his brother’s answer as if he’s reading it from a script in Sam’s head.  
  
“Now you’re going to heal, get your strength back.” A hint of Dean’s deep voice is echoing in the cave where he’s cocooned Sam. “We’ve got this place. We’ve got the tablets, we’ve got Kevin,” he continues, firm and certain. “But first we find Cas and—”  
  
“And?” Sam interrupts him, breathless and impatient, like Dean’s telling him a story he can’t wait to hear the next bit of. He’s surprised Dean hears him, but he does, because his spine curls even more perfectly around Sam. His hands feel huge and grounding; Sam’s struck with the thought of how small those hands must have been when they had carried him, _him_ , a six-month old bundle of fragility, out of their roaring, infernal house.  
  
“And then we take on the world,” Dean murmurs with self-deprecating bravado.  
  
Sam grins against his chest. He wants Dean to see that so he wriggles, lifting his face up. Dean’s hold loosens in sync and he pulls his head back to look down at him. At the angle and the proximity Sam’s almost cross-eyed and he knows he looks like shit, _epic_ shit, a total wreck probably, but light still radiates from his brother’s gaze on him.  
  
He’s about to scoot back in when he registers the strange sensation of the bed breathing under his weight. His eyes return to Dean’s, which have never left his face.  
  
“This your new mattress?” Sam asks, then doesn’t wait for an answer. “The one that remembers you,” he adds, because mattresses are not the only ones with memories.  
  
Dean’s eyes roam his features, left eye to right, eyebrows and forehead, cheeks and nose, mouth, then eyes again. He hums quietly. “And now it remembers you too,” he says.


End file.
